Sunday, June 13, 2010

I occasionally make hay about how much I dislike too much sweetness in my wines. Really, it’s just the overbearing sweetness you might get from a cheap merlot that tastes like cherry candy or something like that. Unwelcome sweetness, sweetness without context.

Jen and I tasted a Moscato d’Asti that was real sweet and real delicious. A 2009 bottled by the Italian producer Albino Rocca. Incredibly floral in aroma, easy drinking, lightly fizzy. The pourer had two or three Moscatos, each sweeter than the previous. This was the high end of the sweetness scale.

The Muscat grape may be the oldest grape variety to be domesticated, and there is evidence that wine from Muscat grapes may have been served at King Midas’s funeral feast. This is intriguing, not least of all because I thought King Midas was fictional.

This would be a fantastic dessert wine, or failing that, a great breakfast wine. I’m not sure how the idea got into our heads, but we opened up our bottle one Saturday morning with scrambled eggs, applewood smoked bacon, and a few berries.

Heaven. The wine splashed coldly through the bacon grease and provided a bracing accompaniment to the fruit. Don’t tell Jen, but I thought it had a bouquet reminiscent of soap. Like, really good, fancy soap you’d encounter at an upscale Paris hotel.

We were prepared for a day of foggy tipsiness, but the tipsiness never came. We couldn’t figure out why we weren’t drunker than we were, having finished off a bottle first thing in the morning. Then we noticed: Alcohol 5% by volume.